Modders Are Building Liberty City In Grand Theft Auto 5

Grand Theft Auto 5

These days, all of your wildest gaming fantasies are just a mod away. For instance, if you really wanted to explore Liberty City within Grand Theft Auto V, there's a group of people who are working on exactly that.

Over on Eurogamer, they're reporting on a Youtube clip that was recently put up by the OpenIV Team. In short, they're modding GTA V so that players can explore a setting from previous GTA games. As you may know, the cities in Grand Theft Auto are usually designed to pay homage to existing cities. Los Santos in GTA V, for instance, packs in all of the California goodness of Los Angeles. The two cities share everything from similar layouts to landmarks in the same general areas. For folks who live in or frequent the area, it's not uncommon to drive through an area in GTA V and feel déjà vu for locations you've visited in the real world.

The same goes for Liberty City, the game universe's answer to New York that appeared in games like Grand Theft Auto III and Grand Theft Auto IV. A far cry from the sunny shores, beaches and laid back attitude of Los Santos, series fans love Liberty City for how it captured the grittier, more tightly packed feel of a city on the East coast.

What's extra wild here is that the folks modding Liberty City into GTA V aren't replacing the existing city. Instead, you can hop on a plane or boat and cross a bit of water in order to reach your new destination. Here's a teaser for what the modders are putting together.

As far as teasers go, this was basically perfect. OpenIV Team promises that it's time to go back where it all started and then the camera pans to a look at a fog-covered Liberty City floating in the distance. They say that the mod is "coming soon," but no actual footage of how the city is coming along is offered. Still, it's pretty exciting to think about there being two living, breathing cities in one Grand Theft Auto game. We're not sure if any of the game's systems will work on the new land mass or if they're just making it an interesting place to explore. Either way, we imagine it's taking a ridiculous amount of work.

Apparently, you'll need to own both a copy of GTA IV and GTA V to make the mod work, specifically, because the cities take up so much space and the team wants to avoid any sort of copyright issues. They're pulling a Rockstar city into another Rockstar game, so there shouldn't be any major issues. Sadly, you won't be able to experience this out of single player but, still, two cities in one game!

Ryan Winslett

Staff Writer for CinemaBlend.